London - Scientists in Manchester claim to have discovered the catchiest tune ever written.
It is, they say, Wannabe by the Spice Girls.
On hearing this news, I spent a good few seconds trying to remember how Wannabe goes. And then it came back to me - “Teyaworrawan-Worrareeyreeywan” and so on, and so forth.
Well, I suppose it is reasonably catchy, though I found it quite tricky to remember how the tune goes from there.
Is it really the catchiest tune of all time? This strikes me as most unlikely.
What about Happy Birthday To You? Or O, Come All Ye Faithful? Catchiness walks hand-in-hand with familiarity; however dreary they may be, it is the songs we have heard most often that gain a head-start in the catchiness stakes.
My personal nomination for catchiest song would be Sugar, Sugar by The Archies. It elbows its way into my head at least once a week, come rain or shine, and, like so many uninvited guests, ignores all rebuffs and takes at least four hours to leave.
But I suppose it could be a lot worse: think of the horror if I was obliged to endure a weekly visit by Queen singing Bohemian Rhapsody or Pink Floyd with We Don’t Need No Education or - eeek! - Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams.
On closer inspection, the method used by these Manchester scientists strikes me as a bit dodgy. It involved an online experiment involving 12 000 participants who had to identify a randomly chosen song out of 1 000 on offer. Apparently, of all the songs played, Wannabe by the Spice Girls was recognised in the fastest time - 2.29 seconds, to be precise.
To me, this suggests that it was the most quickly recognised song, which is not the same as the catchiest. If I had to guess the average age of the 12 000 self-selecting participants in the experiment, it would be roughly 30. Wannabe was the most popular song of 1996, when they would have been 12 years old, which is the key age at which pop songs attach themselves to one’s brain.
I was 12 years old when Sugar, Sugar was No 1, and all my other choices for catchiest song come from exactly the same time: Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) by Edison Lighthouse, Dizzy by Tommy Roe and In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry.
I would also add the song Ging Gang Goolie to the list. To anyone who was not a Boy Scout, this may not ring a bell, but we Scouts used to sing it round camp fires morning, noon and night. Its catchy chorus went: “Ging Gang Goolie, Goolie, Goolie, Goolie Wotcha, Ging Gang Goo, Ging Gang Goo”, lyrics that makes The Spice Girls’ “Teyaworrawan-Worrareeyreeywan” seem positively Shakespearean.
Oddly enough, the very same scientists who have just declared the Spice Girls’ Wannabe the catchiest song ever were in the news the same time last year, stating, with equal conviction, that Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was the catchiest song ever, yet they have mysteriously omitted Can’t Get You Out Of My Head from this year’s Top 10, presumably because, in the meantime, so many people have managed to get it out of their heads.
In another experiment carried out three years ago, in 2011, a team from Goldsmith’s College led by Dr Daniel Mullensiefen - not the most catchy of names - concluded that the catchiest song was not Can’t Get You Out Of My Head or Wannabe - neither of which were anywhere to be seen - but We Are The Champions by Queen, closely followed by The Village People’s YMCA.
Oddly enough, Sandie Shaw, who sang Puppet On A String, surely one of the catchiest Eurovision songs ever, has just publicly recanted, saying that she was forced into it. “When I got lumbered with singing Puppet On A String, I knew there would be a lot of fans who wouldn’t want me doing it,” she said. “They gave me a German Oom-pah-pah band as accompaniment, which was the worst thing ever.”
I suppose a tune can be just too catchy, like a cough or a cold or hiccups. This applies not only to pop but also to classical music: just think of Ravel’s Bolero. Once we have caught it, we try to convince ourselves that we are enjoying it, but the truth is that we simply can’t get rid of it, which is different.
There are many tortures that newspaper columnists inflict on their readers, among them intense irritation, blind anger and uncontrollable rage. But planting an annoying tune in a reader’s head must surely rate among the worst, so I apologise in advance if I have just ruined your day by mentioning Bolero, or Puppet On A String, or any of the others.
Sadly, the best way to get rid of one tune is to replace it with another. So, altogether now! “Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, shake the tree! Ag-a-doo-doo-doo, push pineapple, grind coffee!” - Daily Mail